We're All Winners - But Doesn't That Make Us All Losers - A Rebuttal To Time's POY


by B.W. Thai - Date: 2006-12-27 - Word Count: 502 Share This!

We are Time's Person of the Year, but are we that interesting? When we blog, post, upload, download, send, share, link, and update, we do indeed control a little part of this world. Is this self-made media or are we just diluting the information and entertainment of our lives in a sea of ourselves?

My Chemical Romance made it big on MySpace. Turns out they suck. For all the hype about MySpace being a bastion for self-expression, it isn't exactly a trove of originality. Chances are the profile that you just spent two hours updating looks like nothing more than a color palette swap of the person you just added as a friend. Same goes for your lists of likes, dislikes, favorite movies, and music. That kid from New Jersey with the blow out haircut, his claim to fame is how much he loves to party and live it up. Check out that Emo kid's profile in your "friends" list, her favorite movie is Requiem for a Dream - Guaranteed. Go ahead, check it out for yourself.

You may have recently updated a Wikipedia article, which begs the question, who made you the authority? The idea of an open, editable, constantly growing encyclopedia is a great idea on paper. But when budding academics use that site, and that site only, as reference when writing college papers, we may be in trouble. There are great articles on Wikipedia, and some quality referencing and sourcing, but given the nature of the free form elements of that site, there are bound to be discrepancies with the truth. And there is bound to be a lot of bull. When someone says "It's true, I read it on Wikipedia", it is advisable to end the conversation.

YouTube has given the world a domain name, and some servers. We gave YouTube a household name, and some grainy camcorder videos. The 30-second clips recorded on a cell phone of the last Usher concert are not, in reality, worth the hard drive space. Neither are the endless videos of people in their all-American backyards blowing stuff up and disgracing their families. For every adorable little girl ripping into Bill O'Reilly, you'll also see two little boys beating the hell out of each other, garnering the attention of the local police department. There is enough of that kind of throwaway nonsense circulating around the Internet to make a case for the downfall of man. America, the reason your yard is in the back of the house is to keep the rest of the population from witnessing what goes on in it.

It may be cute to call 2006 the year of the professional amateur, but it doesn't sound right. We need more visible leaders and less blogosphere blowhards. Where are the stars in politics, music, movies, and sports? Our information, because of the ease of its access, needs quality control more than ever. Shouldn't young people shape their world by going out and doing something instead of hitting the refresh button?

But who the hell am I?


Related Tags: time, myspace, youtube, year, magazine, the, of, wikipedia, person, debonair

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